Rabbi Steven Pruzansky

the most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012
is that Americans voted for the status quo – for the incumbent President
and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship,
incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility. And
fewer people voted.
But as we awake from the nightmare, it is
important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that
will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because
of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he
lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the
Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because
Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business
cycle.
Romney lost because he didn’t get enough votes to win.
That
might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost
because the conservative virtues – the traditional American virtues – of
liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations
to moral greatness – no longer inspire or animate a majority of the
electorate. The notion of the “Reagan Democrat” is one cliché that
should be permanently retired.
Ronald Reagan himself could not win an election in today’s America.
The
simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete
against free stuff. Every businessman knows this; that is why the “loss
leader” or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama’s
America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the
47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote,
and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who – courtesy of Obama –
receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both
disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off
the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote;
so too those who anticipate “free” health care, who expect the
government to pay their mortgages, who look for the government to give
them jobs. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.
Imagine two
restaurants side by side. One sells its customers fine cuisine at a
reasonable price, and the other offers a free buffet, all-you-can-eat as
long as supplies last. Few – including me – could resist the attraction
of the free food. Now imagine that the second restaurant stays in
business because the first restaurant is forced to provide it with the
food for the free buffet, and we have the current economy, until, at
least, the first restaurant decides to go out of business. (Then, the
government takes over the provision of free food to its patrons.)
The
defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation (by the amoral
Obama team) of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged
the difficulty of winning an election in which “47% of the people”
start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money –
“free stuff” – from the government. Almost half of the population has
no skin in the game – they don’t care about high taxes, promoting
business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their
free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese.
They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else’s
expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for
any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.
It is
impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such
overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the
people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a
President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for
it.
That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the
inescapable conclusion that the electorate is dumb – ignorant, and
uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because
most other voters – the clear majority – are unintelligent and easily
swayed by emotion and raw populism. That is the indelicate way of saying
that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That
is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even
defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a
rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is
not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor
and cutting taxes for the rich.During
his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson:
“Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called
back: “That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were
never spoken.
Obama
could get away with saying that “Romney wants the rich to play by a
different set of rules” – without ever defining what those different
rules were; with saying that the “rich should pay their fair share” –
without ever defining what a “fair share” is; with saying that Romney
wants the poor, elderly and sick to “fend for themselves” – without even
acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt,
their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending. Obama
could get away with it because he knew he was talking to dunces waving
signs and squealing at any sight of him.
During his 1956
presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: “Senator,
you have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson called back:
“That’s not enough, madam, we need a majority!” Truer words were never
spoken.

Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks
that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to
women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He
could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and
shipped to Mexico (even if they came from Cuba or Honduras), and
unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws.
He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between
governments and unions – in which politicians ply the unions with
public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians
with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and
the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone. He
could do and say all these things because he knew his voters were dolts.
One
might reasonably object that not every Obama supporter could be
unintelligent. But they must then rationally explain how the Obama
agenda can be paid for, aside from racking up multi-trillion dollar
deficits. “Taxing the rich” does not yield even 10% of what is required –
so what is the answer, i.e., an intelligent answer?
Obama also
knows that the electorate has changed – that whites will soon be a
minority in America (they’re already a minority in California) and that
the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do
not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in
the 19th and 20th centuries. It is a different world, and a different
America. Obama is part of that different America, knows it, and knows
how to tap into it. That is why he won.

Obama also proved again
that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal
attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to
his essential goodness as a person; his “negative ads” were simple
facts, never personal abuse – facts about high unemployment, lower
take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of
leadership, etc. As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did
not embrace the devil’s bargain of making unsustainable promises, and by
talking as the adult and not the adolescent. Obama has spent the last
six years campaigning; even his governance has been focused on payoffs
to his favored interest groups. The permanent campaign also won again,
to the detriment of American life.

It turned out that it was not
possible for Romney and Ryan – people of substance, depth and ideas – to
compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents.
Obama mastered the politics of envy – of class warfare – never reaching
out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together
a winning majority from these minority groups. Conservative ideas
failed to take root and states that seemed winnable, and amenable to
traditional American values, have simply disappeared from the map. If an
Obama could not be defeated – with his record and his vision of
America, in which free stuff seduces voters – it is hard to envision any
change in the future. The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a
European-socialist economy – those very economies that are collapsing
today in Europe – is paved.

A second cliché that should be retired
is that America is a center-right country. It clearly is not. It is a
divided country with peculiar voting patterns, and an appetite for free
stuff. Studies will invariably show that Republicans in Congress
received more total votes than Democrats in Congress, but that means
little. The House of Representatives is not truly representative of the
country. That people would vote for a Republican Congressmen or Senator
and then Obama for President would tend to reinforce point two above:
the empty-headedness of the electorate. Americans revile Congress but
love their individual Congressmen. Go figure.
The mass media’s complicity in Obama’s re-election cannot be denied. One example suffices. In 2004, CBS News
forged a letter in order to imply that President Bush did not fulfill
his Air National Guard service during the Vietnam War, all to impugn
Bush and impair his re-election prospects. In 2012, President Obama
insisted – famously – during the second debate that he had stated all
along that the Arab attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was “terror”
(a lie that Romney fumbled and failed to exploit). Yet, CBS News sat
on a tape of an interview with Obama in which Obama specifically
avoided and rejected the claim of terrorism – on the day after the
attack – clinging to the canard about the video. (This snippet of a “60
Minutes” interview was not revealed - until two days ago!) In effect, CBS News fabricated
evidence in order to harm a Republican president, and suppressed
evidence in order to help a Democratic president. Simply shameful, as
was the media’s disregard of any scandal or story that could have
jeopardized the Obama re-election.
One of the more irritating
aspects of this campaign was its limited focus, odd in light of the
billions of dollars spent. Only a few states were contested, a strategy
that Romney adopted, and that clearly failed. The Democrat begins any
race with a substantial advantage. The liberal states – like the
bankrupt California and Illinois – and other states with large
concentrations of minority voters as well as an extensive welfare
apparatus, like New York, New Jersey and others – give any Democratic
candidate an almost insurmountable edge in electoral votes. In New
Jersey, for example, it literally does not pay for a conservative to
vote. It is not worth the fuel expended driving to the polls. As some
economists have pointed out generally, and it resonates here even more,
the odds are greater that a voter will be killed in a traffic accident
on his way to the polls than that his vote will make a difference in the
election. It is an irrational act. That most states are uncompetitive
means that people are not amenable to new ideas, or new thinking, or
even having an open mind. If that does not change, and it is hard to see
how it can change, then the die is cast. America is not what it was,
and will never be again.
For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and
staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is
their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by
Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to
secure Obama’s future at America’s expense and at Israel’s expense – in
effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin. A dangerous time
is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US
will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart
any Israeli initiative. That Obama’s top aide Valerie Jarrett (i.e.,
Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett) spent last week in Teheran is not a good
sign. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the
production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon – and then state that the
world must learn to live with this new reality. As Obama has committed
himself to abolishing America’s nuclear arsenal, it is more likely that
that unfortunate circumstance will occur than that he will succeed in
obstructing Iran’s plans.
But this election should be a wake-up
call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there is an enduring
haven for Jews anywhere in the exile. The American empire began to
decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last
five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is
permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost
its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers,
and that will only increase in years to come. Across the world, America
under Bush was feared but not respected. Under Obama, America is
neither feared nor respected. Radical Islam has had a banner four years
under Obama, and its prospects for future growth look excellent. The
“Occupy” riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress
rehearsals for what lies ahead – years of unrest sparked by the
increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits
and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of
redistribution.
Two bright sides: Notwithstanding the election
results, I arose this morning, went to shul, davened and learned Torah
afterwards. That is our reality, and that trumps all other events. Our
relationship with G-d matters more than our relationship with any
politician, R or D. And, notwithstanding the problems in Israel, it is
time for Jews to go home, to Israel. We have about a decade, perhaps 15
years, to leave with dignity and without stress. Thinking that it will
always be because it always was has been a repetitive and deadly Jewish
mistake. America was always the land from which “positive” aliya came –
Jews leaving on their own, and not fleeing a dire situation. But that
can also change. The increased aliya in the last few years is partly
attributable to young people fleeing the high cost of Jewish living in
America. Those costs will only increase in the coming years. We should
draw the appropriate conclusions.
If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.